Mon Apr 14 23:00:39 2014

At 11 o'clock PM, Day of Thunder, 24th of the Month of the Dark Shades
on the Theran calendar Jalrandar perished, never to return.

You took frustrating situations and ran with them. You just had a bad setup for a scout with dispelling critical. Those level 10 fly potions always dropped. You were a great one to fight and I always had mutual respect for you despite you having a bad match-up with me. Great job!

Strangely enough, I did better killing people without the Pincer Staff mainly because I could perma lag people who had high wimpy because they would constantly wimpy, I would cutoff/anticipate, lag for one round, hit them again, same thing.

I had a ton of respect for Hexugar, although at times I had trouble keeping my frustration in check. Imagine that legacy giving a giant a hard time!

I tried setting up several situations to try to get you, but nothing ever worked, though I think I did get close a few time.

FWIW, I thought this was Twist's char which I would consider a huge compliment.

This was not one of the best characters this year.
No one defines what is best, but you had fun
and so did I in our experiences together. .. i think!

Happy easter, if you are religous... or like eggs.

nt

Thanks for the interactions. That was before I shouldn't be chummy with orcs.

We did quite alot of fighting throughout our lives... though quite a bit less than we could have if I actually hunted you very often.

Killed you that once in Udgaard early on after I had some rough interactions with Qintaris that soured me on Empire for a while. Then you kept coming knocking on the door and we had some great fights.

I seemed to have your number solo (and you're one of the few Imperial willing to fight solo) but you kept at it, and I appreciated that. Hence, I rarely chased you down after we fought. I knew you'd be back when you were good and ready.

Anyways. With you and Ishuntal dying off on the same day, it's a sad day for Crraya.

Well, I was willing to fight you alone because I usually was alone . I kept coming after villagers because of reasons I mentioned in my goodbye, though I did figure out pretty quickly if I had too many other enemies, you would let me play on.

I don't think I ever got you one on one.

I knew you wanted high priest. Thanks for still be cool and making it fun when you did not get it. I thought you played empire very well.
I learned some things from you.

GLWYN

I've had a few other Empire leaders, so it wasn't a make or break for me, although leader con would have been nice. I never tended to look good in front of the Emperor anyway, so I don't think I could have talked him into a swap even if I had tried.

Keep up the good presence.

I rolled Jalrandar to check out hp gains for a frost giant shaman they are pretty nice). I accomplished that, so I guess I can mark
this character down as a success.

If it wasn't apparent, I was pretty frustrated for most of this character's life. I wrestle with whether or not once something is more frustrating than fun if I should delete or gut through it and don't know if there really is a right answer. If this had been a fire giant, I probably would have deleted once I realized ever getting high priest wasn't going to happen, but there was some appeal to having the first frost giant to at least make it to con death. I died a ton, but managed to take a few people down along the way. I set a personal goal at some point to con die after Serra, so I accomplished that at least.

Destuvius:

Thanks for everything, even if you quit taking my calls toward the end. My self assessment is I was a solid Imperial, mainly because I
showed up tried to do stuff when Hero Empire was pretty thin. However, I was probably a marginal follower even though I was tatted and titled. I do think I understand the religion now and it's expectations. I need to stay away from Empire for a while though (I think I've played the cabal around 1500 hours since the beginning of 2013).

Daevryn:

Thanks for the udates to the class. Last year I played my first shaman in over 10 years. This year, I just played shaman back to back which is a testament to their replayability (and probably a poor reflection in my skills if I am con dieing a class I am familiar with in under 300 hours.)

Empire:
Maligor: Thanks for the promotions. If my timing had been just a little different, I think I would have been high priest, but I had no issues with the job you are doing.

Ooglarr: Glad we kissed and made up.

Ashmon: Keep hanging in there. You strike me as a character whose
steadfastness will pay off at some point.

Others: Post and I'll reply

Battle:

I really wanted to just avoid battle, but early on it felt like if I tried to do anything else, there would be a villager around to pick
me off at the worst possible moment. I don't think any particular villager was trying to just target me, but my play time seemed to
match Crraya's, Hexugar's, Serra's, Ishuntal's, and a few others pretty well so my chance of running into someone was always pretty high.

I would always get a chuckle when I read someone bitching about Crraya and Hexugar not being around, because they seemed around way to much for my taste.

Fort:

???????

Props to Worogha for showing up. I knew when to find the rest of you,
getting up at or staying up till 3:00 AM my time to fight a 4-5 on
one really wasn't appealing.

Outlander:

Good job of spreading the teachings of Thar Eris to the Forest of Prosimy.

I actually do have a grudging respect for Foedett. You are actually
somewhat deadly with a build that has no right to be killing anyone,
and I have seen you press in cases where you had a chance to finish someone
off.

Nexus:

One of my most frustrating moments was waking up to villagers, Scarabs, Scions an Empty palace, and the codex at the isle. Evil sways,so instead of attacking the characters making it sway, lets take the codex!

In the end my hatred of battle overruled my hatred of nexus for the most part though.

Tribs:

Vree was my only consistent ally for most of my life. We pulled off a few nice kills.

Orcs:

I love orcs so realizing I couldn't travel with them anymore took me a bit to overcome.

Ogrot: My favorite enemy. We were both will to throw down under whatever circumstances and both sloppy enough in our play one of us
would normally make a critical mistake that ended up in someone being a corpse.

Oloice: I could have done a few things different in that last fight, but I was kinda ready to be done with Jalrandar.

I thought you did a great job. You were always attempting to retrieve, raid or hunting enemies.

Seeing Jalrandar alone for ages, clearly frustrated, but still trucking on, was very
inspirational. I was rooting for you to get some recognition, because your situation on many levels were really hard.

My only criticism is that while your actions were faultless, I more or less got the big Z vibe from you, i.e. laid back, go get the enemies, you win some, you lose some attitude.
A little more RP would go a long way, but hey, it is something I struggle with myself.

Return to outlander and I promise I will go shake the tree

I was trying to figure out how being laid back equaled Zulghinlour.

I did rage at my enemies quite a bit, at least the ones I didn't like.

You were consistent and skilled. I knew whenever I fought you I would need some downtime to rest off the maledictions/mana loss. You were a scary presence when coupled with a warrior because I knew the dispel beat down was coming down my path.

Having fought against you, I really want to try a shaman with your paths sometime down the road, it was an interesting combination. Do you have any thoughts on any skills specifically?

I've had four paths now, and I'd say vengeance was defintely the strongest of the four. Tooth for a tooth is really nasty (transfer maladictions back to the one that maladicted you) and Eye for an eye was still good even after the tweak. I actually got killed more trying to charge eye for an eye up before the tweak than I landed kills with it. Bulwark is great, but has a big mana cost so I ended up skipping it at time if gettin low on mana and rarely put it back up after it fell.

From Hell's pact I definitely underused gluttony til the end and never got any mileage from betrayal which is probably pretty nice, but I forgot about it after the first few times I landed it and didn't notice anything. Aspect of the devil is situational, but very nice in those situations. Heresy is really nice damage if you fight a chaotic good. Hellfire is better damage than demonfire, but fire based which is a plus in some situations and a negative in others.

Overall startegy for me usually was just pick whatever damage supp would have the most punch and then try to land eye for an eye if I made my target fle.

Lowbie Ooglarr looted the piss out of you.

I really did try to sell you some stuff back, but I was sphere greed and it was all about the money and shinies.

Then cue a whole bunch of stuff that ended up with me in the Empire...I think you're directly the reason I ended up Empire. The way you promoted me was suave as ####, and tres cool with how you were threatening the demotions.

You made the Devil path look sexy, you were very fun to throw down with too.

I thoroughly enjoyed fighting and interacting with you and I'm glad that my lowbie loot of you didn't cause too much of a schism between us, because Jalrandar was an OG badass who was always willing to throw down.

My thought when I started offering rewards and bounties was hoping that life would be miserable enough for you that either you take the oath to get Empire off your ass or would delete (because at that point you probably had about 10 hours on the char?). I think I probably just fed you a bunch of PK wins instead, but it did end up with you in Empire which looks like is working out pretty well for you and the cabal(don't know the specifics of your oathing.)

Once you were in, it seems like you were around a lot and knew your #### and were contributing, so I decided to let bygones be bygones. Your peace offering was way beyond what I would have asked for as well (I took 100 gold over what would have bought me off, I think I had 40 gold left when I con died).

Honestly I think you were a better follower than Imperial, so I guess you can count that as a double success, because you were a great Imperial too. I think you did many great things and had tons of great evolutions through the whole characters life. It was fun to see you pull off some of the great pks that you di and I think you were one of the very first followers of mine to truly embrace the double aspect approach to the religion. All in all, I am very thankful that you stuck it out and hope that you had fun. If you have any feedback or criticism that you want to give me to help improve the player side of the experience, feel free to shoot me an email: destuvius@carrionfields.com

Thanks for the compliments. I'll send you something next week once I collect my thoughts better.

Nice job - you were always wanting to bring it to the Fold. Good job on turning my trap against me, I should have just dropped all, and fled in hindsight. My despoil items weigh a ton, and were probably the reason for not being able to flee. Apart from that, we had a lot of skirmishes, which were fun in the beginning, but I have to admit that in the end, it just got somewhat boring for me. Still, powerful and competent adversary, GLWYN.

If we fought we were going for a very long time with little liklihood either was dieing unless something else swayed things. I think we ended up 2 and 1, but one of those two was when Eye for an Eye didn't have a cap and I managed to keep it charging up for over a RL hour I think (ie not reaching full health). The other time, I can't remember how many tries it took me to get rid of your ooze shield, but it finally worked out.

That one supp you figured out to start using definitely changed how our fights went, but I think you missed a trick - my mainhand was always infernal power and my offhands were cold damage, aspect of the devil would have made you pretty much invulnerable to me until I took the time to gather a wrath weapon. Still, the first meeting went horribly badly for you (I'd actually use it as an example of the quintessential Ogrot kill at hero) but by the end you were one of my most difficult fights.

Anyway props on always bringing it and playing out a frost giant all the way.

I wish I had played around with devil path a bit more, but I was normally always gunning for trying to outdamage my oponent then hopefully finishing with eye for an eye.

I was very hesitant to use aspect of the devil unless I was fighting a necromancer since it meant giving up black sanc and word/teleport. Plus, if I was invuln, I expect you would have just run away.

jeesh

You were a real tough fight. That eye for an eye is nasty! i know you got me at least once with it. It was just before I could enter "heal heal" at the healer. I don't know if the healing would have saved me but I like to think 15 more seconds and it would have! To be honest though we hadnt fought in a while and I completely forgot about that nasty little sup of yours and so it was well earned on your part.

I hated Ishuntal the villager, but Ishuntal the scion was pretty cool and made you actions as Ishuntal the villager make a lot more sense.

Tough and tricky are the best words I could use to describe Jalrandar. It was kinda strange. To begin with I ranked with you some when it seemed team evil wouldn't be overly strong for some time and now the swing is nearly full reverse so we went from being somewhat allies to mostly enemies. Your combination and quick thinking made you surprisingly resilient and a rough enemy to face. Well done and come on back soon.

The preponderence of evil in the cabals it was an option for, and re-opening of Scarab defintely had things skewed dark for a long time. However, most of them were Empire enemies as well, so for Jarandar it meant he had the whole mud to fight. I am not good enough to fight the whole mud.